Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Staying Calm while Reading the News

As you may have noticed from previous posts, I have a hard time reading the news. This is because I get angry, upset, sad, worried, enraged, and annoyed by the things going on in the world and getting headlines (because lots of awesome things are happening too, but they don't get the same attention). Sadly, reading the news is part of my new job, as it is important that the association is current with Canadian affairs and leading world opinions and activities. My exposure to news has thus taken a quantum leap from spotting the odd catchy headline in my iGoogle home page or Safari top sites, to in-depth methodical scanning of major Canadian newspapers and Google news results five days out of seven. If I don't stunt my tendency towards getting upset by the news, I'm going to burn myself out and maybe become insensitive to the important things I'm reading.

So, today I'm working on staying calm while I read the news. It's harder than you think. There are strange things in the news today. I am working on reading them calmly, getting all the way through an article before having a reaction (usually it's a third to half-way through), and tempering my rising blood pressure with the (mostly) even-keeled reporting that the article's writer has provided. I shun the comments sections now as if they carry the blackest plague - which, given how dangerous and harmful ignorance is, isn't too far from the truth. I'm also trying to breathe yoga-style through irritating articles and the closed-minded, backwater views expressed by some members of the online newspaper community. It's an exercise in zen meditation. I hope it will save me from becoming a horribly negative, jaded person. My optimism gets its butt kicked every day, but deep breathing exercises might just be enough to buttress it.